The Politics Of Yuck
As Ken Starr's report approaches, Washington is bracing for a
storm of all-too-vivid details from Clinton's personal life--and
not just from his alone
By Richard Lacayo
For once the federal government is going to produce a document
that won't collect dust on library shelves. Sometime between now
and the end of this month, the report of independent counsel
Kenneth Starr is expected to be sent to Congress, where it will
promptly explode. Washington is bracing itself for a text unlike
anything it has ever handled, with interludes that describe, in
all too fascinating detail, half a dozen or more anatomical
engagements between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Depending
on how vivid it is, Starr's report could be the closest thing to
pornography ever issued by the Government Printing Office.
Even if the most embarrassing parts are walled off in a section
made available only to selected members of Congress, nobody
expects the wall to hold. Titillating stories that may or may
not be from Starr's grand-jury room have been churning for weeks
through the Internet and the supermarket tabloids, waiting for
mainstream news outlets to pick them up, give them the luster of
legitimacy and dispatch them to the wider world. Last week NBC
Nightly News gravely confirmed a Drudge Report item that Clinton
and Lewinsky once had sex after he attended Easter services. No
big deal. More scabrous stuff than that bounces regularly from
cyberland to Jay Leno without stopping for the niceties of
confirmation.
Much as they might enjoy the President's deepening humiliation,
and they do, even Republicans are wary. Playing in the mud is a
messy game for everybody. Starr's report is likely to mean a new
cycle of smutty particulars to be worked over endlessly by the
news-entertainment continuum. A public already sick to death of
unlaundered dresses and dirty jokes about cigars could blame
Republicans for starting and prolonging the whole thing even as
citizens turn away in disgust from the President himself.
Republicans have the comfort of expecting that in November
voters will be more likely to punish the Democrats. After all,
Clinton is the head of their party, while Ken Starr, a chronic
loser in opinion polls, is not on the ballot. That's why a vocal
and growing minority of Republicans, led by House whip Tom
DeLay, is demanding that the full text of the report be made
public as soon as it arrives. For different reasons, so did
Democrat John Dingell of Michigan. Like many Democrats, he may
figure that the details will come out anyway, so it's better to
suffer a short, sharp shock than a prolonged drip of leaks.
Everybody else is in unexplored territory and knows it. With so
much at stake Democrats in Congress are anxious not to be cut
out of the process that decides how the report will be handled.
And Republicans have to be careful not to let the whole thing
look like a partisan funfest. So this week House Speaker Newt
Gingrich will hold an unusual meeting with minority leader Dick
Gephardt and other members of the House leadership to decide
just who gets to see the dirty parts. The House rules committee
has already drawn up a proposal that would have Starr's full
text sent at first only to members of the judiciary committee,
which has first jurisdiction over any impeachment process. All
other House members would get an expurgated summary, though the
entire report would be sent to them as well if the committee
decided it provided grounds for impeachment.
Even under those rules, House committee hearings could easily
turn into peep-show-style government, a prospect that worries
judiciary chairman Henry Hyde. As the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill
proceedings showed, it's hard to play the role of Olympian
legislators while you're asking questions about pubic hair. When
Congress is reduced to picking through salacious details, says
Arizona Senator John McCain, a Republican, "we're all tarred
with the same brush."
What complicates the matter is that Starr has legal
justifications for including anatomically correct details in his
report. To back up any claim that the President committed
perjury, the independent counsel needs to show that Clinton lied
when he told lawyers for Paula Jones that he and Lewinsky did
not have sex, at least not by the light of the definition of sex
approved by the judge, which was more technical than the
instructions for hooking up a VCR. Since that definition hinged
upon specifics of who touched what and what went where, Starr
will need to spell out just those things. That was apparently
why he secretly called Lewinsky back to his offices on Aug. 26
for two hours of wrap-up questioning so explicit it was the
verbal equivalent of a cavity search. The questions involved
such intimate specifics that Starr arranged for all lawyers and
stenographers in the room to be women.
Another variable in this dangerous game is the question of how
long to play it. Polls say most Americans want the matter
brought to a quick conclusion. A lot of Democrats would be happy
to oblige. The popularity of the censure option, which the White
House is not yet ready to accept, is growing fast among
Democrats in Congress, especially the ones who face re-election.
Cautiously triumphant Republicans are in no mood to let the
President off the hook that fast. When Senate majority leader
Trent Lott said last week that he didn't think censure was
enough, he was signaling that no quick end was in sight.
In the devastating 25-minute denunciation of Clinton that he
delivered last week on the Senate floor, Democratic Senator
Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut stopped short of calling for
censure, limiting himself to a more ambiguous call for a "public
rebuke." All the same, a stunned White House is worried that his
speech, in which Lieberman roasted Clinton's behavior as
"immoral" and "disgraceful," will break the spell that has held
most Democrats back from putting real distance between
themselves and the President. Two other highprofile Democrats,
New York's Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nebraska's Bob Kerrey,
followed Lieberman to the podium to say they agreed with him.
Lieberman made his speech despite appeals from White House chief
of staff Erskine Bowles and Senate minority leader Tom Daschle
that he hold off, at least until the President had returned from
his trip abroad. But afterward Daschle came up and put his arm
around Lieberman.
In the charged atmosphere of Washington, the most worrisome
possibility for everybody is a dirty war in which the two sides
start outing each other on sexual capers of every kind. For
months there have been hints from Clinton's defenders that if
his personal life was fair game, Republicans could find their
own lives dragged into the sport. On Larry King Live two weeks
ago, the President's brother Roger saw fit to observe that "some
of the political people...had best watch themselves because of
the old 'glass house' story. Be very careful." In the online
magazine Salon, a Clinton corner in cyberspace, an unidentified
"close ally of the President" said White House hard liners
wanted to go after the personal past of House Speaker Newt
Gingrich, majority leader Dick Armey and Indiana Representative
Dan Burton, the unblushing Clinton hater who not long ago called
the President a "scumbag," and also chairs the House committee
that has been investigating the Democratic campaign-finance
scandals.
So there was a shudder around Washington last week when Burton
abruptly announced to the press that he and his wife had been
"separated" three times during their 38-year marriage. The
Congressman said he made the announcement because Vanity Fair
magazine was preparing a tell-all profile that he insisted had
been inspired by the White House. At a town meeting in Indiana
last week, he hinted to constituents that there would be more to
tell. "If something comes up that you read about that you think
Danny shouldn't have done," he said, "I will own up to it." By
the end of the week, Burton had owned up to the Indianapolis
Star what Indiana political circles had been buzzing about for
years: that he had fathered an illegitimate son in the early
1980s. He told the paper he wanted to go public to deflect
attention from the boy and his mother.
Burton offered no evidence for his complaint that the White
House was behind the story, a notion that a spokeswoman for
Vanity Fair dismissed as "ludicrous." And the charge gave senior
Clinton adviser Rahm Emanuel the happy chance to deny it with
the observation that the White House considers the private life
of public figures to be "off limits." But a collective chill
went across the capital. "There is real anxiety among House
Republicans," says a G.O.P. leadership source. "They realize
that none of us is without sin. And most of them are obscure;
they've never had to deal with intense scrutiny from the
national media."
To say nothing of a media in the promiscuous mood to which the
Lewinsky story has brought it. Last week Fred Barnes, an editor
of the conservative Weekly Standard, remarked on Fox News that
the buzz of the moment in Washington concerns whether Clinton
has had sexual relations with a second intern. "If he has," he
offered, "that will certainly be dynamite." What he didn't offer
was a word of evidence, the thing that used to distinguish
reporters and commentators from gossip columnists. Three days
later, Bill Press, the onetime chairman of California's
Democratic Party who now represents the left on CNN's Crossfire,
tried out a new line about Representative Burton. He asked
former Burton staff member David Bossie if he thought Burton
should resign if he had had sex with a congressional intern.
When opposing TV-belligerent Pat Buchanan attacked Press for
trafficking in "sleaze," Press replied that "it's a rumor among
some journalists," but the next day he apologized for asking the
question.
Clinton's defenders are enraged by the prospect that Starr's
report will be a dirty book about the President's personal life.
The emerging White House counter-strategy is to refuse comment
on all stories about sex and hit back strictly against Starr's
attempts to catch the President in perjury and obstruction of
justice. But a legalistic defense that says the President was
telling the truth because what he did wasn't exactly sex is
unlikely to go far with most Americans. They figure that sex is
sex, no matter what the lawyers say. That makes it all the more
likely that the President's side will have to resort to a
defense that accuses the other side of sheer hypocrisy about sex
because the President's accusers have secrets of their own. And
that could mean a lot more private lives won't be so private
before all this is through.
--Reported by James Carney,
Karen Tumulty and Michael Weisskopf/Washington and Jay Branegan
with the President
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